OK I got a Hikvision NVR with 4 poe ports and I've got the best of both worlds, SS running on my laptop for mobile and convenient monitoring and recording if I like and a dedicated recorder that doesn't suffer from the limitations of my hard pressed macbook. I got everything up and running, but here's the rub. Forgive me if this is really dumb but I thought the point of an NVR was to connect the cameras directly to it and bypass any router bottlenecks then obviously connect the NVR to the router so the cameras are still visible from the LAN. The only way I can get the NVR to display video is to leave the cameras connected to the router and the router connected to the NVR, leaving the NVR ports redundant. Having got everything working if I plug one of the cameras into the NVR directly it becomes 'disconnected' from the NVR and my SS setup on the Macbook ?